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by milverton



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Doctor John Watson, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV First Person, Retirement, Sappy, Sussex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 01:53:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1880679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milverton/pseuds/milverton
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I have loved and lost love one too many times in my life and I knew then, at that moment, that Holmes would end that terrible streak of misfortune. Holmes was, indisputably, my past, my present, and my future—and I knew that I would not lose him for a very long time.</p>
            </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [ebparentheses](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ebparentheses).



> Written for the June '14 Holmestice Exchange.

The year was Nineteen Hundred and Four, six unhappy months after my wife’s funeral, and I was suffering from a miserable trifecta of emotions: loneliness, heartache, and grief.

My practice was thriving and busy but every night I would retire to a flat where only dark thoughts kept me company. It was not a dissimilar experience to the three years I had spent in mourning of Holmes’s supposed death and, in that same time frame, my dear Mary’s death.

Grief, that old tireless sadist that he was, revisited me like a well-acquainted foe, antagonising me endlessly, hoping I would succumb to his ugly machinations and become so heavily laden with sadness I could not function (one is reminded of our departed venerable Queen Victoria, mourning for decades, thinking of nothing but the loss of her loved one and shirking duties). I simply would not let the fiend win.

On a whim one day after I had seen my last patient, I told my charming secretary Janie to notify my patients that I was to be away for the next day or two. I also requested that she forward the address of the practice of my colleague, the intelligent and more than capable Dr. Pendergast, in case a patient had a dire emergency.

I thenceforth locked up my practice, returned home, packed a singular luggage bag with basic travel necessities and retreated to the countryside to see the only person I knew could pull me back safely from the brink of desolation—Holmes.

**\--**

Holmes’s villa was situated on the southern slope of the Downs and there were remarkable views of the Channel where majestic white chalk cliffs jutted out into its coast-line. It was a reclusive place, a lone cottage far removed from the already sparse humanity in the vicinity, but it was homey. That particular visit was my third, but I still managed to be enchanted by the Downs’s natural charm.

When I arrived, it was late evening. The stars were more vibrant than those in London, unimpeded by polluted skies, and the air much colder due to its proximity to the Channel. I knocked on Holmes’s ivy-laced door, and Holmes answered after only a few moments.

I had not seen Holmes since my wife’s funeral all those months ago. His hair had grown longer, greyer, and was unkempt; he was gaunter, if possible, and dressed in a tattered mouse-coloured dressing gown, one of his dressing gowns I had noticed he was very fond of when we lived together at Baker Street, and a wrinkled nightshirt. He did not look surprised to see me in the slightest. If anything, he looked pleased.

“I am sorry to have arrived unwarranted,” I said with a watery smile.

Holmes made a loud noise of disapproval. "Nonsense! Never apologise for your presence, Watson." He appraised me then disappeared suddenly, leaving me bewildered, and hastily reappeared and jut his chin out in the direction of the sitting room. “Come in, my good man. Come in."

I entered the messy sitting room, familiar paraphernalia from 221b and papers with Holmes’s inelegant scrawl strewn across the floor and furniture. He considered a few papers on the settee before, queerly, raising his foot and kicking them away, imploring I take a seat, then asked if I desired tea, which I responded to in the affirmative. I sat down, placed my luggage aside feeling, finally, at peace.

Holmes reached for the kettle that sat on the uppermost cupboard and picked it up with a soft grunt, bringing my attention upon him fully. My eyes fell to Holmes’s hands, which were covered with black, leather gloves, rather incongruous to his indoor, relaxed attire.

“Holmes, are you cold?” I asked curiously.

“What is that, Watson?” Holmes called back.

“I said ‘are you cold?’” I repeated, louder. “It’s rather warm in this room and yet you are wearing gloves.”

“Ah, no,” he said immediately in a brusque tone, indicating to me that there was certainly something amiss. Holmes filled the kettle with water, hung it in the fireplace then sat delicately in the armchair across from me, staring at the crackling fire.

I observed him sceptically. Perhaps he sensed my scrutiny, for he said without turning to look at me, “It is nothing. I have bumped my hands against the table and it is swollen and mottled. An ugly sight. That is all.”

“Honestly, Holmes,” I said incredulously. “Both of your hands?” Holmes was not clumsy in the slightest, and I found his purported accident difficult to believe. Holmes did not answer me, further exacerbating my suspicions. He was taking me for a fool! “May I take a look?”

“You may certainly not,” he snapped.

“Holmes!” I cried indignantly.

Holmes sighed in a pained way that suggested obliging me was the most difficult thing he would ever have to endure. He pulled off the gloves, flinging them aside carelessly, and held his hands out, head turned resolutely away from me.

I gasped.

I moved toward Holmes and slowly lowered myself so I was seated on the edge of the table just directly in front of him. I reached out and grasped Holmes’s swollen wrist, cradling the back of the hand and fingers in my upturned palm, then leaned down to inspect it closely.

Holmes’s elegant and slender hands were no more. I recalled Garrod’s 'Treatise' which I read in the mid-nineties on the subject of what Holmes’s affliction appeared to be. His fingers were enlarged, there was slight radial deflection of the terminal phalanges, and his knuckles were large and nodular. The diagnosis was undeniable.

“It is Rheumatoid Arthritis, Holmes,” I announced with a heavy heart.

Holmes sniffed and shrugged one shoulder.

I was astounded by his nonchalance. “This is a serious affliction, Holmes! I must acquire some aspirin--"

“That won’t be necessary," Holmes interrupted sharply. "I have already acquired aspirin, attempted the Gold treatment, and examined and researched to the best of my ability any other possible medicinal cures but I am, as you have remarked upon in your chronicle of our first case together—what was the fanciful title you gave it?  _A Study in Scarlet_! A rather pretty little case, wasn't it?—not omniscient and there is only so much in my bailiwick I can utilise. Such are ‘my limits!’ I have traveled to premier universities throughout this great nation and most of Europe hoping to stumble across some nascent brilliance heretofore unknown to society. ‘Perhaps,’ I reasoned, ‘A cure is on the cusp of discovery, hidden in the laboratory of a university. A place where minds are eager to learn and discover!’ Alas, there is not. Mankind is always learning, and time is the greatest teacher of all. For now, I must cope."

Somehow saddened and uplifted all the same by Holmes’s speech, I turned his warm hand around and caressed the back of it lightly with my index finger as if it were fine Chinese silk. Holmes’s fingers twitched at the touch.

I had often been enraptured by Holmes’s hands, adroit, spidery, beautiful things that produced the finest (and sometimes, when Holmes was in a black mood, the most egregious) music I had ever known. These were hands that had rifled meticulously and endlessly through clues, pored through informative monographs on complex topics, that lovingly stifled the blood that trickled from a knife wound upon my person, had pressed a cool cloth to my forehead when I was ill.

I looked up at Holmes, who was affecting unconcern, feeling at a loss. “I wish you would have alerted me in the early stages of the affliction. I could have taken care of you and helped prevent it from worsening.”

“It is over and done with, Watson,” Holmes said tightly.

Slipping from my grip, leaving me bereft, Holmes moved to retrieve the kettle, but I stopped him, placing a hand lightly on his back. “Allow me,” I said softly.

Holmes did not turn to look at me. “I am not a cripple just yet," he said icily.

“Of course you aren't, my dear fellow. I just--"

“You needn’t—“

“Holmes. Please," I said sternly. "It is the least I can do.”

Holmes said nothing for a moment then, in a whirlwind of annoyance, turned sharply, bounded past me and flopped dramatically into his armchair.

In deathly silence, we sat sipping tea until I assumed Holmes fell victim to  _ennui_ and began accounting an intriguing case he had stumbled upon in a village some miles away from the Downs, a case where he exonerated the son of a vicar wrongly accused of being a horse-slasher.

“I do not seek crime, Watson. Somehow, it finds me. Even in the remotest of places…” Holmes noted wistfully.

I was surprised to find Holmes had kept the bottle of Glenkinchie I had given to him in celebration of the conclusion of a minor case some years after we had first met. He had tried the whisky then and liked it well enough, but had not taken a sip of it since that convivial evening. He was glad to offer it to me as we sat by the fire in his Sussex home, and I was happy to accept.

We drank and conversed and laughed into the wee morning hours until unfinished tea had gone cold and all the whisky was drained from the old bottle. I was more at ease than I had been in a long while. I knew Grief would not disappear in that one evening but in the weeks to come, Grief would rapidly release his grip on me, leaving me to look back upon love lost fondly instead of miserably.

After much quarreling perhaps not uninfluenced by drink, I conceded to Holmes’s insistence that I sleep in his bed while he retired on the settee. But I could not sleep, whisky singing in my veins.

I rose from bed and padded into the sitting room to find Holmes draped over the settee, eyes closed, churchwarden pipe hanging precariously from his mouth, a miasma of smoke in cloud above his head. It was a pose I had seen him assume so many times at our old lodgings that the image appeared frozen in time and reinforced that Holmes was not only my past but my present.

I could not help but think that Fate had a cruel way of bringing me back to Holmes. Somehow, I had ended up where I was when my life started anew, that is, when I met Holmes. I have loved and lost love one too many times in my life and I knew then, at that moment, that Holmes would end that terrible streak of misfortune. Holmes was, indisputably, my past, my present, and my future—and I knew that I would not lose him for a very long time.

“Watson, stop lurking in the shadows like some common prig scoping out his victim,” Holmes interrupted my musings, his eyes remaining shut, smirking around the pipe’s mouthpiece.

“My apologies,” I murmured as I continued into the sitting room and sat in Holmes’s armchair. Holmes opened his eyes, and placed the pipe aside, flinching nearly imperceptibly. This little display was but one instance in a deluge of instances where Holmes appeared to be in pain (evidenced that day when he picked up the kettle, prodded at the fire with a poker, removed a book from a bookshelf). No matter how many times I had insisted to aid Holmes in these tasks, Holmes had rejected my offers. I could not allow Holmes to deteriorate.

“It is very painful,” I observed.

Holmes shrugged. “Life goes on.”

“Holmes, I am—I am rather worried if the RA worsens that you will be unable to perform any tasks at all.” Holmes was shaking his head, scoffing, thoroughly dismissive of my statement, but I soldiered on, sat up straight and rounded my shoulders. “I propose to become your personal physician."

Holmes barked out a laugh.

“I do not say this in jest!” I asserted, slightly offended. “I can oversee your progress, help you with exercises, and administer medication whenever necessary. Dr. Pendergast, my colleague, would be more than happy to take on my patients,” I said hastily, thinking aloud. “My flat can be sold in no time. It is located in a very central location in London, after all.” I looked at Holmes earnestly. “You must know your good health is of the utmost importance to me, Holmes."

Holmes was watching me with outright fascination. “You would throw away your life in London to—“

“What life is there to throw away?” I cried out in utter frustration.

Holmes looked startled by my outcry. I moved to join him on the settee and seeing my intent, Holmes shifted his position so as to allow me to sit beside him. Impulsively, I reached out to take Holmes’s wrist carefully in my hand, positioned the palm of his hand flat atop my palm before bringing the hand up to my mouth and pressing a reverent kiss upon a knuckle. I looked up at Holmes from beneath my lashes. “As not only your doctor, but your friend, please let me assist you.” 

“My dear,” Holmes started quietly, a hint of surprised exasperation infused in the words. “I would like nothing more than for you share lodgings with me once again.” Suddenly, he was energised and amicable and announced grandly, “Perhaps, in the scheme of things, my gruesome hands have resulted in some good, after all!”

**\--**

After all business was tended to in London, I left for Holmes's villa—my villa— _ours._

Holmes held the door open for me, smiling, beatific and welcoming, and I was compelled to return a smile of similar calibre. I walked inside into the space that was now partly mine, that I was to share with my greatest and dearest companion Holmes, with no plan to diverge from the arrangement any time in the near future or, perhaps, ever, and dropped the luggage to the ground with a loud bang.

I turned to find Holmes leaning against the closed door, still smiling, but it now took on an amused air.

"Welcome home, Watson,” said he.

Before I could even think to restrain myself, the elation spurred by that joyous moment overcame me. I surged forward and planted an impassioned kiss upon Holmes's lips.

I will never know the apex of Sufi ecstasy, the devoted training, chanting and dervish whirls that culminate in a sensational feeling of  _Tawhid_ , that Oneness with the Creator, but perhaps it was something akin to what I felt in that moment.

My hands fell to Holmes’s waist, bony, protruding from his skin, I kissed him again and I pulled him--warm, lanky and undeniably masculine--close. Holmes did not respond to my kiss, I noticed startlingly after a moment too late, absorbed in the moment and the kiss, and I extracted myself, my heart thudding nervously against my chest.

How terribly had I miscalculated? I stepped back, ashamed, to assess the damage. Holmes's eyes were shut, expression languid, and he ran a tongue over his lips, slowly, maddeningly, tasting me, then opened his eyes.

I sputtered. "I am a fool! I’m so very sorry Holmes. That was—I do not even know why—I cannot—" Holmes raised a cool, placating hand. My mouth snapped shut.

"I am trying to understand something," he said placidly. I pressed the palm of my hand to forehead and looked away, embarrassed to face Holmes dead on. He was going to tell me he could not fathom my actions, was going to ask me leave in the instant and return to London, I was certain of it, until he spoke again. "I am trying to understand why, precisely, you stopped."

I whipped around to gape at my friend.

"You were concerned because I did not reciprocate. Forgive me. I was distracted by the way you were nearly devouring me." I did not know what to say. I was so thunderstruck by Holmes’s words. Holmes cocked his head thoughtfully. "I was rather pleasantly distracted, mind."

Inspired, I stepped forward and took Holmes in an embrace, Holmes going stiff, and words came stumbling out of my mouth gushingly. “Holmes, I hope you know I am overjoyed to be living with you again. I have felt so very alone these past dreadful months and could think of nothing but my poor wife—but then I thought of you, always lighting up the room with your intelligence, intrigue, talents. It was like going home to a safe, comfortable place when I thought of you. It seems you are now the one fixed point in my changing world, and it is a privilege to have you there. You have brightened my life!”

I stepped back, letting go of Holmes, and Holmes stepped forward and loomed over me. “If I have brightened your life, you have blinded me with your brilliance,” he said. I looked up at Holmes, eyes prickling with tears. “Now, might I convince you to kiss me again?”

“You need not convince me,” I said playfully. I placed my hand at the nape of Holmes’s neck, and we kissed, our lips moving in tandem, wet and hot, my heart fluttering.

**\--**

Months later, after we had gone for an evening ramble along the coast we entered the sitting room and Holmes stopped dead in his tracks. I followed Holmes's line of vision to see that and he was staring at a pile of books lying harum-scarum in a corner of the room, dusty and long unused.

"What is it, Holmes?" I said anxiously.

Holmes let out a loud sigh. "Watson, Watson, Watson," he began softly, shaking his head dismally. "I am but a shell of a man since I can no longer lose myself in Paganini and Sarasate!”

I was startled by his sudden woeful passion. He promptly flung himself onto the settee and sprawled out like a great cat, head turned away from me.

Unfortunately, the RA had become worse in the first few months I had moved into the villa; I had been tending to him carefully but it had amounted to nothing.

There was a far-reaching impact of the RA I had not considered and it was a shame, truly. Some of Holmes’s passions were very hands-on, particularly apiculture and playing his violin.

I knew Holmes sought solace in the violin. In the first year of our friendship, Holmes had trouble baring his emotions to me. When he could not express himself properly as Holmes, the man, he would do so as Holmes, the musician. If I could not read Holmes, I could read him by the tone of the piece he had chosen to play.

One may recall when I described Holmes as an automaton. Let it be known I had done so on Holmes’s insistence so he appeared more aloof and mysterious; that was how he wished to be perceived by our readers. After a while, Holmes warmed up to me and was able to express himself more fully—he was caring and loving when he wished to be. He always tried hard to repress his emotions but he became more readable and open as the years passed (Well, at the very least, he did with me).

In an attempt to put Holmes in a better mood, I crossed the room and dug through the pile of books, salvaged the violin case, brushed off dust, sat down in Holmes's armchair and lay it across my lap. "Do you remember when you taught me the first measure of that Caprice? Number three, if I'm not mistaken?”

Holmes sat upright immediately, regarded me with amusement. "I don't believe you ever succeeding in learning it."

"Come, now! Shall we see how much I remember? It is about time I play something sweet for you."

"As thoughtful as that sentiment is, some things are best left unreciprocated," Holmes murmured under his breath.

I ignored him, and removed the violin from its case.

Holmes tut-tutted. "Watson, you are handling it like an ape. It is--"

"Yes, yes, one of the few left in the world, expensive and delicate and all that. I am well aware, you have told me more times than I can count. And I am handling it perfectly well, thank you," I said, irritated. I began to tune the instrument, Holmes scolding me with every wrong turn of the pegs. Once Holmes was satisfied, the violin in tune, the bow rosined, I positioned my chin on the chin-rest, awkwardly held the violin and rested the bow on a string.

"Well, then. Are you ready to be amazed?"

Holmes was smirking at me. "I have no expectations whatsoever."

I ignored his sardonicism yet again. Confident, I dragged the bow down the string, emitting a strident sound, cringing. My shoulders slumped, dejected. “It would appear I remember absolutely nothing.”

Holmes snorted loudly. “Of course not! Now, hold your elbow out more, slide the bow carefully, carefully—ah, no. It seems I will be living vicariously through your screeches. I shall have you ready to perform at St. James Hall in a century at this rate!”

**\--**

Nearly a year into my new living arrangement, Holmes had lost significant mobility in his hands and fell into general malaise and fatigue most mornings. The RA was triumphing.

One evening in April, rain raging against the windowpanes, I was lounging in bed reading _The Scarlet Pimpernel_  since I had not had the opportunity to see the popular play on stage in London, and I was momentarily lost in the swashbuckling protagonist’s world of adventure until I became aware of Holmes in my peripheral vision. He was, glaringly, standing stock-still. There was scant lighting save for the gas lamp beside me, so I did not know if Holmes could even see himself. (Holmes had a macabre preference for funereally dark environs in those days. I wondered if it was Holmes’s way of obscuring the sight of his hand, which I suspected he deemed unpleasant-looking since he wore gloves nearly all the time. He usually acted cavalier about the affliction, but I knew sometimes it was merely bravado).

After a moment of observance, I noticed Holmes was moving minutely, quietly struggling with buttons, attempting to disrobe himself then huffing in annoyance. I placed my novel aside, removed my pince-nez and came to Holmes's side.

"Let me assist you, darling,” I said.

Holmes, surprisingly, relented without fuss and I deftly undid the buttons, helped remove his shirt by pulling it over his head, then undid the tie of his trousers, allowed him to lean on me in order to step out of the trouser legs. Holmes did not look at me once nor speak throughout this process, hugging himself protectively when he was stripped nearly bare, opting to stare forlornly outside the bedroom window.

Once I gently slipped the fresh nightclothes onto him Holmes finally looked at me. By the dim light of the singular lamp, which highlighted his angular profile in a ghostly manner, he looked exhausted--and defeated.

"Do not lose heart, Holmes," said I solemnly, cradling the back of Holmes's skull in my hand, bringing him down to my height and pressing our foreheads together.

"Impossible," he whispered, reached out, and held me close. "My heart is here."


End file.
